The Politics of the Missouri River

In December 2015, 20 members of Congress from the Missouri River Basin signed a letter discouraging the Army Corps of Engineers from fully pursuing legally required, long-planned efforts to include habitat recovery into river management. Whether from ignorance or bias towards special interests, they are interfering in the Corps’ efforts to carry out Congress’ own laws. In the 1980s, Congress wisely began an effort to restore a significant portion of the highly altered Missouri River floodplain and return to the public the benefits of a connected floodplain. Unfortunately, the congressional letter promotes an abandonment of that effort and a break in the public trust. The wasteful and dangerous position taken in the letter puts the general public at risk and continues the trend of squandering their hard-earned income to “protect” special interests who have exploited the river exclusively for their benefit for decades.

After spending billions of dollars since the 1940s on flood control, dams, levees, maintenance, and flood clean-up, the Missouri River floods even worse than before the river was altered. In altering our river, we’ve lost the ecosystem services that a natural river system provides us, such as flood storage, water filtration, wildlife habitat, and recreation.

The Missouri River System was built in an era of big dams and levees, motivated by the erroneous belief that engineering could overcome nature. Ironically, this (mis)management of the river has resulted in increased and more catastrophic flooding, extensive loss of biodiversity, and a river that flows too fast for barge traffic. Government projects that favored floodplain landowners and the barge industry have resulted in a highly degraded ecosystem and the loss of the vast majority of floodplains all along the Missouri River.

Our primary legal basis for challenging the status quo and promoting river restoration is the Environmental Species Act, which is often in direct odds with flood control laws that have propped up the barge industry and protected floodplain farmers. So far, environmental legal challenges have failed – the courts pointed back to Congress to resolve the conflicting laws.

We lose over $2 billion annually in benefits that had been provided by the floodplain and river habitat.

The Politics of the Missouri River

The Letter

On December 17, 2015, 20 members of Congress from the Missouri River Basin, six senators and 14 representatives, sent a very pointed letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Army, urging restrictions on the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) that could significantly limit their options in complying with the Endangered Species Act in the Missouri River. Essentially, this request, if strictly complied with, would likely place endangered species in jeopardy.

The letter represents a problematic response by members of Congress to the earnest and legally required attempts by government agencies to comply with laws that Congress itself has written. Unfortunately, this letter is a clear indication that members of Congress are being influenced by anti-environmental and heavily subsidized special interests to the detriment of the general public and future generations.

For the last 30 years, the Corps and USFWS have intertwined in an effort to fix the many significant problems caused by construction of the congressionally authorized Missouri River Bank Stabilization & Navigation Project (BSNP). The BSNP turned the lower Missouri River into an ineffective and environmentally damaging barge canal that had cost taxpayers over $750 million to build and maintain as of 1980, per the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Report of the Chief of Engineers (See Tables 20-1 and 21-A). Ongoing maintenance and restoration costs have added hundreds of millions of dollars to the total cost.

Background and History

Damming and Channelizing the Missouri River

The Missouri River had been known for centuries to flood frequently and ruthlessly, as is its nature. Regrettably, most stakeholders have refused to accept this fact, attracted by the flat and fertile floodplains created by the frequent flooding, and so floodplain farmers and industry have developed along almost the entire lower Missouri River. The government has promoted this development for economic purposes, without really considering all the negative ramifications.

After failing to construct a 6-foot deep channel during the early part of the 20th century and attempting to deal with the impacts of numerous floods, a compromise scheme was authorized by Congress through the Flood Control Act of 1944 called the Pick-Sloan Plan.… Read the rest

Introduction: Why river restoration needs watchdogging

What happens when the supposed “river guy” is actually anti-river?

River restoration is important for water quality and its effect on human health, flood prevention, the economic consequences of flooding on government budgets and individual people, as well as for habitat restoration, species protection, and human quality of life. River restoration is so important to the millions of us who live near a river, source our drinking water from a river, fish in rivers, or visit rivers, that we can’t blindly trust our elected representatives to restore our rivers, protect our health, and fight for a better quality of life for all. We have to actually pay attention to the words they say and the actions they take to ensure the government acts in the public interest.

In MCE’s role as watchdog, we have noticed a pattern of anti-environmental statements from Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer over many years. Something new and disturbing, however, is his description of himself as the “de facto river guy in Congress.” He did not restrict his statement to being the expert for the river segment within his district, or even the Missouri River. He implies that he is the Congressional river guy for all our rivers.

Let’s take a look at the statements of this “river guy” and see how well his comments reflect a knowledge of river ecosystems, cost-effective flood prevention methods, and how best to use the government resources to improve life for all. Below is a detailed rebuttal to the attacks Representative Luetkemeyer (and he is not alone in this) has made upon the limited river restoration actions that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) are pursuing through the Missouri River Recovery Program (MRRP), as well as some other related river issues. There is no shortage of issues, so I have selected nine positions he has taken to rebut, with pertinent portions highlighted.

[The italicized paragraphs within each position below are verbatim from pertinent documents with direct quotes contained within those documents in quotation. Our rebuttal is indented and identified as “Response”.]

The Evidence

1) River restoration projects are wasteful spending:

Congressman Luetkemeyer “is looking forward to continuing to” cut “wasteful spending on projects with no real benefits.” (Columbia Tribune 3-8-15)
——“One can’t help but take notice of the significant disparity of funding for habitat restoration and land acquisition and funding dedicated to operations and maintenance,” Luetkemeyer said.… Read the rest

1. Introduction – What we have wrought on our Midwestern rivers

Row crop agriculture has always been intricately tied to the promotion of barge navigation on our large Midwestern rivers, primarily for exporting corn, wheat and more recently soybeans. Agricultural interests were heavy promoters pushing to change our rivers into barge canals and to this day continue to lobby for expansions of the system.

Because none of our rivers are deep enough for their full lengths for the minimum nine-foot drafts required for towboats used, especially during low flow periods, engineers called for alterations on an unprecedented scale to create an adequate channel depth and width for these over-sized barges. Conveniently, the river alterations actually reinforced the connection with agriculture by easing the conversion of floodplains to cropland, in some locations creating new land that was immediately placed into agriculture.

On the Missouri River this involved constructing massive dams upstream and then shortening, straightening and narrowing the lower portion of the river to the point that it has little resemblance to the original river. About 522,000 acres of floodplain and riverine habitat were lost through the process of constructing a nine-foot channel; all of that acreage altered and much of it, as well as land along the river created by the process, became levee-protected corn and soybean fields.

Congress authorized the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) to channelize the river several times. The final iteration of this process is called the Bank Stabilization and Navigation Project began inthe early 1950s and was completed about 1981, paid for by taxpayer funding. Massive impacts to river habitats have resulted.

Much the same has occurred in the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) and Illinois River from the construction of the nine-foot channel there. In the areas north of St. Louis where the rivers are not consistently deep enough they were impounded with locks, which are low-head type dams constructed solely for navigation purposes creating pools rather than flowing rivers (See Figure 2).

The alterations constructed below St. Louis in the Mississippi River were much the same as Those built within the Missouri River. Again, the floodplains were the site of large losses of natural habitat, and remaining floodplains were turned into flattened monoculture-row crop landscapes protected from the river by levees.… Read the rest

When special interests wanted to narrow, dam, shorten and channelize our rivers for their benefit they never had any problem with spending the public’s money with reckless abandon and without regard for any natural resource or fiscal consequences. Those barge, grain, chemical and coal interests who have pressured lawmakers for levees, dams, wing dikes and dredging have suddenly gained a fiscal conscience about the public’s money and now spend much of their time lobbying to stall or stop programs aimed at mitigating river damage, while second guessing advice offered by river ecological experts or those who opposed the river’s destruction in the first place.

The Missouri River is the victim of all this damming, shortening and channelization, primarily through what is commonly called the Pick-Sloan Project. Taxpayers foot the bills. Contained within the 1944 Flood Control Act, as amended, is the following list of eight purposes for the Missouri River: